In Splendid Isolation
17 May to 30 June 2002 Helen Maurer and Sarah Woodfine will present new work playing with perception and illusion. Helens projections and Sarahs pencil drawings create images that invite the viewer to escape to spaces of desire and isolation where memory and imagination converge. Helen Maurer continues to investigate the properties of light and glass using overhead projectors and fibre optics to create scenes drawn from memories: caravan camping sites, deckchairs, domestic interiors and more recently scenes through the forest. Glass objects and layers of glass sheets are arranged on projectors and shelves so that the light source casts or reflects an image on to a wall. The glass elements appear awkward and clumsy yet the resulting images read perfectly. Notwithstanding the emphatic sophistication of its construction Helen's work allude to a snapshot quality that triggers a sense of loss. With the fragile glass objects visible that form the luminous scenes on the wall, the apparent ease of the image conjures a quality in which one feels invited to slip through a kind of looking glass. Sarah Woodfine's intense meticulous pencil drawings of buildings emerge from a pitch black slipping between two and three-dimensional realities. Her new work for the show depicts flat-pack models of Tudor-style barns and cottages which we will want to touch and construct in our mind's eye. However there is something disarming and unsettling about Sarah's imagery that makes us hesitate to fully embrace her invite to play. These flat-pack drawings are not fully functional and point toward an illogical place, a shadowy realm or dark dream where apparitions reach out and where things are askew and off-kilter. Both artists use two and three dimensionalities to tease our mind and disturb the familiar with unease and magic. A catalogue with an essay by Marco Livingstone will be published. Helen
Maurer completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in
1997. Selected exhibitions: 2002 Solid Air,
Crafts Council, London; Unscene, Gasworks,
London; 2001 A Month in
the Garden, Museum of Garden History, London; Solo
show, Danielle Arnaud, London; 2000 Is there
Anybody Home? Gallery Westland Place, (touring to Galerie Zűrcher,
Paris); 1999 Quotidian, Paper Bag Factory,
London; Casting Installing, The National Glass Centre,
Sunderland. Commissions: Royal Holloway College in
collaboration with Kinnear Landscape Architects; Chandelier
for the Royal Geographical Society. Helen Maurer was Fellow
in Glass at Central Saint Martins College of Art, London 1994-95 Sarah Woodfine graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 1995. Recent exhibitions: 2002 By Hand, Hales Gallery, London; 2001 A Month in the Garden, Museum of Garden History, London; Xmas, Outline, Amsterdam; America, Gallery Westland Place, London; hit & run, The Old Seager Distillery, London; The Difference between You and Us, Five Years, London; 2000 Solo show Five Years (Danielle Arnaud), London; There is Plenty of Sunshine in Summer, Outline, Amsterdam; 1999 Perfume, Danielle Arnaud, London; H Gamle Prestegard, Norway, Haugesund Billedgalleri, Norway. She was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2001 and is a finalist for the Pizza Express Prospects 2002.
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